


Reflections Of What Isn't

by raendown



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, I like to break Kakashi, and then sort of fix him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 06:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12227337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: The reflection that looks back at him has never been his own.





	Reflections Of What Isn't

It wasn’t as though he never saw his face. He shaved regularly - couldn’t stand growing a beard under that skintight face mask - and that sort of required one to be able to see what one was doing. It’s just that he never really  _looked_. Not enough to take in the whole picture and what he knew, somewhere in the very back of his mind, what he would find there. 

What he would find was not his own face. Kakashi had never had his own face. The only thing which belonged to him was the scar through his left eye, earned in the midst of terrible failure and just one of the times he was too late to do any good. 

The face he wore belonged to another. It belonged to a man who had failed the village by doing the right thing, to a man who had reached for honor by running the blade across his own stomach and left the shreds of childhood pooled across the living room floor for his son to find. A man whose face alone had made men sneer and women cross the street, clutching their children’s hands and whispering frantically not to look at the ‘disgrace’. 

When Hatake Kakashi looked in the mirror he didn’t see himself; he saw his father Sakumo. As a young boy who thought he knew the world at five, Kakashi had denounced his own father and sworn to never be like him. The mask he had grown tired of wearing had been resettled over his face like a protective shield. He wanted nothing to do with this mouth that was not his own, this nose that belonged to another, this chin that he could not claim. 

He knew that face so well and yet it had been so long since he really  _looked_. Today, Kakashi looked. Today he had only just awoken after crashing for twelve hours at the end of a three week mission which had nearly killed him four times. Today he was tired and sore and empty as he peeled off his mask to look back at the face in the mirror. 

Sakumo stared out at him, weary, strangely younger looking than Kakashi remembered him. One eye was closed by the scar that ran through it, brown and smooth with age, and the shadow of facial hair made his skin look dirtier than the actual dust than clung to him. 

“I see your face when I look in the mirror,” Kakashi murmured out loud, raising his fingers to trace the lines where Sakumo’s lips moved with his words. “Does that make me a sinner too?”

His breath made fog on the surface before him as he snorted. 

“Too late to wonder about that. I’m a sinner in my own right now. Are you proud of me, I wonder?”

He closed his lips and waited, but Sakumo fell silent as he did and there was no answer. A sigh escaped him and he looked away, reaching for the shaving cream. The least he could do was help his father maintain a half-human appearance and remove that unsightly growth covering his face. 

It took a while. It always did. Even in his own hand Kakashi hated blades against his throat. Each stroke of the razor was slow and deliberate, muscles tensed as he listened to the scrape of metal on skin. Slowly the foam disappeared in long swathes to reveal the porcelain features underneath. He washed the remnants away and patted himself dry with a towel, eyes drifting like magnets back to the mirror. 

Sakumo stared back, apprehensive. Kakashi wondered what had his father so worried until he noticed for the first time in his life that there was something  _different._  

Weren’t those his mother’s cheekbones? Wasn’t that his mother’s beauty mark? Isn’t that his mother’s soft fall of hair in front of his eyes, so very similar to Sakumo’s and yet just not the same? Kakashi watched Sakumo’s eyes water and tears slowly spill out, running down the crease of that smooth brown scar.

Because that wasn’t Sakumo’s face. That was his. That was the face of Hatake Kakashi, a product of both his father and his mother, a man who had lived his own life and made his own mistakes and paid for it with his own blood. That was his own face in the mirror, not his father’s. It belonged to him and him alone. And strangely, he wasn’t ready for that. 

Kakashi held a hand over his mouth, muffling the quiet noises escaping him as he watched tears roll down his cheeks, something painful like relief swelling in his chest until he thought his ribs might crack outwards from the pressure. 

It wasn’t as though he never saw his face. It was just the first time that he had seen himself in the mirror. 


End file.
